Reuters suspends employee accused of aiding Anonymous

Earlier this week, 26 year old Reuters deputy social media editor Matthew Keys was indicted on charges he handed Tribune Co. network passwords to Anonymous, which were then used to deface the LA Times website for about 30 minutes. The alleged offense took place in 2010, before Keys was hired at Reuters. The DoJ press release mentioned a maximum penalty of up to 30 years in the case. Today, Reuters suspended him with pay.

Okayyy… gonna have to put on my sysadmin hat here. And let me also preface by saying I’m a huge sympathizer of Aaron Swartz, and think that the case against him was absolutely trumped up and awful.

This is completely different however: Keys had some sour grapes against a former employer. So he handed over his password and encouraged a notorious hacker group to go in and, (I’m quoting the article here) “fuck some shit up”.

Part of the reason US law needs a better definition of “hacking” (which isn’t even a real technical term) is that we clearly can’t see the difference between someone going into a library and using a wagon to take out more materials than they’re supposedly allowed to (Swartz), and someone who gives the keys for the library to a bunch of punks and encourages them to vandalize it after hours (Keys).

EDIT: Reading comprehension fail. Looked at the earliest article, not the summary. If Keys wasn’t working for Reuters yet that it seems pretty open and shut, no?

Also a small matter of presumption of innocence. Is this guy convicted, or is he just a guy who was accused by a guy who says he’s Anon but now he’s a snitch? Suspension with pay seems like a reasonable compromise between turning a blind eye and the underside of the bus.

OFF TOPIC WARNING: Exactly. It’s more illegal to rob a liquor store than it is to ruin the nation’s economy through fraudulent practices. Sometimes big companies and banks are fined for their misdeeds, but typically if you look at the size of the fine versus how much they made violating the law, the fines become incentives for fraud. They provide a nice, no personal consequences out for fraud. Who wouldn’t pay a 100k to make a million or more? That seems more like profit sharing than a fine.

30 years for this? It’s odd that Scooter Libby got 30 months for his role in exposing an undercover CIA agent and effectively destroying her network of informants in Iran, while this guy have his password and some hackers defaced a website for 15 minutes. There is no justice in this country.

You’ve focused so exclusively on the semantics of my statement that you run the risk of sounding like a uptight prick.

That the potential punishment for turning over passwords to a hacker collective who neither caused real harm nor stole anything of real value could be commensurate with someone who compromised a clandestine network in an act of political retribution is what’s wrong here.

Who fucking cares if Libby was subject to 30 years? He was sentenced to 30 months and didn’t serve one minute.